December 3, 2004

Building a Winning Culture

By | December 3, 2004

It was like nothing I’d ever seen before and nothing I may ever see again. Sitting, standing, jumping, and praying on Saturday afternoon, I watched my alma mater win the Missouri Class 3 State Football Championship in one of the best high school games in the history of the sport.

Despite scoring first on a 40-yard field goal, my Rams found themselves down by 25 points after the first half. But in a turn of events even most former Country Day players could not foresee, the team erased the deficit to defeat the defending state champions from Harrisonville, 45-42, in double overtime — the largest comeback in state championship history. The win gave the team a perfect 14-0 record, including a regular-season win over the larger Class 4 state champion (that team’s only loss of the year).

After the game, as the guys gathered around their trophy for pictures and an encore salute to the crowd, memories of the winning culture that imbues the school stirred in me. It was a feeling of pride I haven’t felt much in the last four years, and it reminded me how easy it is to fall behind, to become complacent with the status quo, and how hard it is to come back and end up on top.

Cornell, whose ranking in the annual U.S. News report is 14th overall and has slipped to lowest in the Ivy League, finds itself mired in that dilemma right now. Though we have several marquee programs, such as hockey, wrestling, lacrosse, and polo, many of our teams routinely finish their seasons near the bottom of the Ancient Eight totem pole, and many of our students don’t even notice, because they simply don’t care enough or are too busy with their own agendas to attend the games.

Unlike Country Day’s players and fans who expect to be the best at all they do all the time, Cornell’s students often appear to settle for mediocrity or fail to realize that individual accomplishments, though important, will not create the collegial atmosphere of excellence necessary make this entire place great.

We’re a backup school: the easiest Ivy to get into, the hardest to get out of. We’re a League middleman, finishing atop the standings in some areas, filling in the bottom rung in others, but occupying the middle tier in most. We want to take pride in being part of the Big Red, but we frequently fail to act on that desire.

But, like the Country Day Rams, whose hopes of a state crown seemed out of reach in the first half their game, Cornell, too, can rebound. On the eve of our own winter halftime, we have a chance to take a breather, to regroup, to come out next semester with a renewed commitment to becoming the best. With a little heart, a lot of guts, and a different attitude, we can instill a winning culture in this place and put Cornell back on top where it belongs. On a microcosmic level, head football coach Jim Knowles ’87 and his team proved that such a turnaround is indeed possible. Not once this season did Knowles allow his staff or players to utter the word loser; in fact, he never even let them think about words like weak — a term he struck from the team’s vernacular by renaming a safety position “whip.”

Instead of getting down after a loss, Knowles focused on winning the next contest. Instead of bemoaning defeat, he inspired his team with motivational quotes and speeches. And instead of explaining failure, he worked to avoid it in the future.

That style of coaching, while perhaps rare here or anywhere, is the only kind the football players at Country Day have ever known, thanks to a venerable man named Ron Holtman.

For four decades, Holtman has paced the sidelines as the head coach of the Rams and taught history to countless freshman and sophomores at the school. With steadfast confidence, infallible character, and unrelenting determination, he has guided Country Day to 38 winning seasons and 382 total wins — the most for any active coach in the state.

Though this may have been his last season at the helm of the storied program he helped build, the tradition of excellence he established at the school will carry on forever. It’s a tradition we could learn from here.

Right now, Cornell finds itself far behind in a higher-stakes game with its national reputation on the line and at least 13 other top-quality schools fighting hard for that coveted number-one ranking. There’s no reason we can’t win out.

Two weeks ago, Knowles’ squad came close against Penn. Though unable to complete the upset, the gridders showcased the kind of persistence and heart it takes to make a champion — the same kind of mettle and mindset each person at this school must demonstrate if we want to pull ourselves up from the bottom and climb to the top again.

The process starts with a commitment from each of us, because winners beget winning.

Whether you decide now or on New Year’s Eve, resolve to make this a university where everyone expects nothing less than the best, where people think not only of their own goals but those of the entire team. The challenge begins in January, and it may be difficult, but come May and each month afterward, we will all reap the rewards.

Related

ByJanuary 20, 2005

The effects of the recent South Asia tsunami were felt by the Cornell community, even while students were on their winter break. Saiful Mahdi grad, whose family lived in Aceh, Indonesia, returned home in early January to search for family members. Mahdi, according to Mazalan Kamis grad, a close friend and neighbor, lost 15 immediate and extended family members in the disaster. Kamis estimated a budget of $6,000 for his return trip and immediately e-mailed his friends to request donations. According to Kamis, as the money flooded in, with over $50,000 in the first week, he created the Aceh Relief Fund, and Mahdi became the fund’s representative in Aceh by helping to lead relief efforts there. “Saiful, as a grad student in Cornell, is very experienced in providing leadership in times like these. Everyone is rushing to help, but few people can organize effectively. Our group is very effective — we give direct help to the people who are suffering. Other agencies provide aid in camps, but not to the people who went to their relatives that lived in villages unaffected by the tsunami. Saiful realized this gap and the focus became to help those people,” Kamis said. According to Brendan O’Brien, director of the International Students and Scholars Office, Mahdi is the only known Cornellian affected by the disaster. For his trip home, the ISSO helped Mahdi with registration issues and also provided financial support. “All of us were extremely saddened by the loss of life. We’re most concerned with Saiful and his family. We hope that we don’t hear of any other students but we’ll do what what we can to help students who’ve suffered a loss,” O’Brien added. “Saiful is working with other students who returned to help — they are more effective than other relief agencies because they know the place; they know where to get and give help. We also have no overhead cost; we’re all volunteers, all the money goes straight to Aceh,” Kamis said. The Aceh Relief Fund has received nearly $61,000. Kamis mentioned that one individual donated $10,000. He attributed the fund’s ongoing success to the fast mobilization of friends and word-of-mouth. An article describing Mahdi’s losses in the tsunami and his trip to Indonesia appeared in the Ithaca Journal on January 3, which Kamis said has generated a lot of interest and support for the fund. “You can read his journal, his account of how he carries on his day-to-day work in Aceh. Saiful actually established two schools in Aceh before he came to Cornell that were both very successful, but one school was entirely destroyed by the tsunami and the other was damaged,” Kamis said. “We will start rebuilding the other school and make it into an emergency school, a place for the kids to play, to have some normalcy in their life, to have people looking after them. And since these are not government schools, we have the freedom to rebuild without being trapped in government bureaucracy.” The fund has set up a mobile clinic in the affected area of Aceh, which will include the aid of a physician and nurse, under Mahdi’s leadership. In the long term, the group will “adopt a village or sub-district” and focus their energies on providing aid there. Kamis plans on focusing primarily on health and education, and especially on the welfare of children. He added, “We do wish for more support from Cornell. You can find more information about the fund at www.acehrelief.org.” Many other student-run organizations on campus are gradually mobilizing volunteers and relief efforts as the spring semester gets underway. Kirsten Rose, vice president of the Red Cross Club, said in a statement, “This fundraising is in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity and Cornell EMS. … The Red Cross will be on Ho Plaza the first Monday and Tuesday of classes to collect donations.” Help A Life, according to its president, Fatima Iqbal, is orchestrating Project Make and Give, a project where students make baby blankets that are donated to infants in need. The organization plans on sending the blankets to a city in India affected by the tsunami. Individual students are also creative in their efforts. Evan Variano grad, plans on visiting area high schools with a “tsunami-in-a-tube,” a device that he will use to demonstrate the physics of tsunamis to students.Archived article by Julie GengSun Staff Writer

Article body:
Up to 1.2 million low-income college students will have their Pell Grants reduced, and as many as 100,000 students will lose their grants entirely, in the 2005-06 school year after revised allocations by the omnibus appropriations bill that Congress passed on Nov. 20 for fiscal year 2005.